You may be new to the world of gardening and you like to know more facts and information about it. Coming across square foot gardening made you wonder what is square foot gardening? What makes this different from the other methods of gardening that a lot of gardening lovers do? You have to know what it is because this may be the method that you want to use in order to arrange your favorite plants. This is mostly used for vegetables because you have to be precise in measuring the amount of soil that they are going to take up.

Square Foot Gardening in Simple Terms

Square foot gardening is actually a process wherein you divide your whole lawn or garden into small, square sections and the square sections will be raised. This is different from typical gardening wherein you have to consider the whole size of your lawn. What you will get if you follow this method of planting is a small but very neat looking garden wherein your different plants could sprout.

This method was created by Mel Bartholomew during the 70’s and since then, more and more people have used this in order to improve their garden. All of the seeds are placed in 1 x 1 square foot plots. It can be more challenging to plant mature plants as they may take up more space. Hence, when planting mature plants, they may have to be placed in more than one square.

What You Need to Build Square Foot Garden

In order to build and improve your square foot garden, you may need some items like fertile soil, compost for all of your plants as well as some items that can make building your square foot garden more fruitful. It will also help if you know where to correctly place your square foot garden. You are most likely to place them in areas wherein a lot of sunlight can penetrate the area and make sure that the soil that you are going to use is rich and loamy.

How to Know if the Soil is Fertile Enough

Since it has been emphasized that the square foot garden will not work without the right soil, you have to be sure that the soil is fertile enough. You need a compost soil that is about 6” thick in order to grow your plants. Of course, if you do not have enough compost and you want to make your plants grow at the soonest possible time, you can put the plants in the square foot garden first then after some time, include more and more soil as you allow it to grow.

Compost can be made by making use of various organic materials that can make the soil richer but if you do not know how to make it, you can easily buy compost from different stores. Just make sure to purchase from trusted stores to be sure with the quality of the products that you are going to get.

Have the Right Supplies

It will be a great idea to have an inventory of all the things that you need to make your garden grow. You can buy from nurseries and from trusted sites online. Perhaps you do not have the right shovel yet. You can purchase the perfect one. So that you will not have any issues with color coding all of the seeds you are going to put in your garden.

Some Benefits of Square Foot Gardening

If in case you are not sold on the idea of trying out square foot gardening just yet, you may want to know some benefits that you will appreciate like the following:

Easy to Do. Even if you do not have a lot of skills in woodworking, you will find it easy to do the frames that you need for your garden. Even if you do not have the right tools to create the frames, you can purchase frames to let you start gardening soon. You can check out garden grid kit too.

Low Maintenance. Do you know that when you make use of this type of garden, you do not have to worry about weeds? You can even plant on top of weeds without the weeds penetrating your garden so you can be assured that it will be easy to maintain.

Provides Better Drainage. There are some plants that do not need to be exposed to too much water otherwise they will drown. This is to be expected from square foot gardening. The water can be drained easily and soil compaction will not be a problem too.

Expect a High Yield. Unlike vegetables that will be planted on normal soil, you can expect that this will actually produce a lot of vegetables. The main reason for this is because you can plant in every inch of the garden. You can maximize your space and increase the possibility to harvest more than what you have initially intended.

Conclusion

It is evident that square foot gardening may be a method that you are missing out on. Why not try to do it now? It can give you all the benefits that are mentioned above and possibly more. If you have more questions about square foot gardening, do not hesitate to comment on the section below. Remember to do the following: